D. Scott Meadows
Dear friends, we began expounding Revelation 12.13-17 this morning, and because of a long introduction and great care taken in identifying the woman of verse 13, we must resume this afternoon only at verse 14. We will take things at a much quicker pace now, and, God willing, conclude this chapter today.
Please remember how I pointed out that these verses show a pattern of reciprocation, back and forth, like players in a game of chess, between the Devil and God, although God is not explicitly mentioned. Here is the outline I have prepared for you:
Satan Persecutes the Church (v. 13)
The Lord Preserves the Church (v. 14)
Satan Lies to the Church (v. 15)
The Lord Saves the Church from Satan’s Lies (v. 16)
Satan Focuses on the Remnant of True Believers (v. 17a)
True Believers Bear the Marks of Spiritual Victors (v. 17b)
Now let us read the inspired text once again.
13 And when the dragon saw that he was cast unto the earth, he persecuted the woman which brought forth the man child. 14 And to the woman were given two wings of a great eagle, that she might fly into the wilderness, into her place, where she is nourished for a time, and times, and half a time, from the face of the serpent. 15 And the serpent cast out of his mouth water as a flood after the woman, that he might cause her to be carried away of the flood. 16 And the earth helped the woman, and the earth opened her mouth, and swallowed up the flood which the dragon cast out of his mouth. 17 And the dragon was wroth with the woman, and went to make war with the remnant of her seed, which keep the commandments of God, and have the testimony of Jesus Christ.
Amen. We saw previously that
Satan Persecutes the Church (v. 13)
Now let us rejoice in God’s response for His beloved people to that Satanic attack.
The Lord Preserves the Church (v. 14)
The text says, “And to the woman were given two wings of a great eagle, that she might fly into the wilderness, into her place, where she is nourished for a time, and times, and half a time, from the face of the serpent.” Oh, dear friends, this is wonderful news!
Recall that “the woman” is most certainly the church of Christian believers—not “Israel” in the OT sense, but a new and spiritual Israel, those who are spiritually circumcised in our hearts, who believe in Jesus, who share the faith if not the genes of our spiritual forefather, Abraham.
Preserved in the Wilderness
The resource God provides for this persecuted church is flight. In the vision, she “flies into the wilderness” with “two wings of a great eagle,” and that wilderness is called, “her place.” Just as the devil’s persecution of the church in this vision pertains to the time period between Christ’s first and second coming, so also does this flight and dwelling in wilderness. If it were not for such protection from God, the Church of Jesus Christ would have been utterly destroyed a long time ago.
One important consideration when interpreting the book of Revelation is that it uses Old Testament imagery to convey spiritual reality in this New Testament age and in the age to come, that is, eternity ahead. And there are a couple very conspicuous allusions to the redemptive history of Old Testament Israel right here in this verse, even while they have nothing to do with that people, but with the New Testament Church on earth until Christ returns, the Church Militant, as it is called.
Here, God is clearly drawing a parallel between the original exodus of Israel from Egypt and the exodus of the Christian Church from Satan and the hostile world under his sway. God saves His people by removing us from the devil’s kingdom, even as He brought Israel out of Egypt into the wilderness and made them His holy nation there at the base of Mount Sinai.
The first allusion in verse 14 to the Old Testament is the mention of an eagle’s wings as a means of flight from danger. When slavery in Egypt was a memory and Pharaoh’s army had been drowned in the Red Sea, the Lord said to His people, “Ye have seen what I did unto the Egyptians, and how I bare you on eagles’ wings, and brought you unto myself” (Exod 19.4). Of course the language is highly poetic. There were no literal eagles involved. Another passage in Deuteronomy elaborates,
For the LORD’s portion is his people; Jacob is the lot of his inheritance. He found him in a desert land, and in the waste howling wilderness; he led him about, he instructed him, he kept him as the apple of his eye. As an eagle stirreth up her nest, fluttereth over her young, spreadeth abroad her wings, taketh them, beareth them on her wings: So the LORD alone did lead him, and there was no strange god with him. He made him ride on the high places of the earth, that he might eat the increase of the fields; and he made him to suck honey out of the rock, and oil out of the flinty rock; Butter of kine, and milk of sheep, with fat of lambs, and rams of the breed of Bashan, and goats, with the fat of kidneys of wheat; and thou didst drink the pure blood of the grape (Deut 32.9-14).
The image of the eagle evokes the Lord’s majestic power to save from the clutches of an enemy, and His ability to bring His people by whatever means or without any means at all into a place of protection and provision, where He can show them the greatness of His love to them with an abundance of rich, gracious blessings—the best of which is fellowship with Him.
So when God gives John this vision of the church “given two wings of a great eagle, that she might fly into the wilderness,” the correspondence between OT Israel and the NT church is completely unmistakable. And has not the Lord lavished His Church with rich spiritual gifts ever since Christ ascended to heaven? It is even as the apostle Paul said, “Wherefore he saith, When he ascended up on high, he led captivity captive, and gave gifts unto men” (Eph 4.8; alluding to the prophecy of Psa 68.18). And among the very best of those spiritual gifts are the gifted ministers Christ appoints for the perfecting of the saints—apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors and teachers (Eph 4.11-12)—because by them “we all come into the unity of the faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God, unto a perfect man, unto the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ” (Eph 4.13). In other words, the pastor-teachers are not the blessing per se, but they are a divinely-appointed means to the great blessing of likeness to and communion with the Lord Jesus Christ, and fellowship with one another in Him. This is the glory to which God has predestined us.
Preserved with Nourishment
The second allusion is to the wilderness. The “wilderness” is “her place where she is nourished for a time, and times, and half a time.” Taken in isolation from the rest of Revelation, the language is cryptic, but we have already seen that the time period is symbolic for the Church’s experience of life between the first and second comings of Christ to earth.
“The wilderness” has profound symbolic meaning in some passages of Scripture. While the Lord brought OT Israel into the literal wilderness of the Sinai Peninsula, between Egypt and Canaan for 40 years, the mention of wilderness came to have several connotations. One of them is the place of a tryst between lovers.
The Lord told Moses to demand of Pharaoh that he let the Israelites go “three days’ journey into the wilderness, that we may sacrifice to [i.e., worship, with sacrifice being a very important part of that worship] the LORD our God” (Exod 3.18). They were to “hold a feast” to the Lord in the wilderness (Exod 5.1), and a feast has biblical connotations of fellowship. The Lord wished to be alone with His people very much as a loving husband seeks private time with his wife, for the purpose of enjoying each other to the fullest, without distraction. It is not without reason that OT Israel is portrayed as the wife of Jehovah, and the NT Church is the bride of Christ.
In later years when Israel had almost completely turned away from the Lord, He announced His intention to woo her once again, and win her back to Himself in covenantal loyalty. “Therefore, behold, I will allure her, and bring her into the wilderness, and speak comfortably [tenderly, ESV] unto her” (Hos 2.14). And in the wilderness, the Lord says, He will give her vineyards (Hos 2.15), which were so important for OT Israel’s supply and well-being.
In John’s vision, the woman in the wilderness is comparably “nourished.” The passive voice is used, so that the provider of nourishment is unnamed, but surely it is the Lord God—the same Lord who gave Israel “streams in the desert” and “manna in the wilderness” during the whole 40 year pilgrimage before they entered the Promised Land.
Does it not become perfectly clear, then, that we must interpret this vision as God’s promise to abide with His church in covenantal love during the inter-advent period, and to keep us alive by His Spirit and feed us with His Word so that we survive the journey from our former bondage to our future glory? Let Satan rage all he wants, even if some among us must suffer severe persecution including martyrdom, the Church is being sustained with the Lord’s own spiritual presence, protection, and provision until He returns from heaven for us!
Now, we must hasten to an end of the exposition, so consider, next, that
Satan Lies to the Church (v. 15)
John saw this also in his prophetic vision: “And the serpent cast out of his mouth water as a flood after the woman, that he might cause her to be carried away of the flood.”
The picture is very dramatic. The woman has found refuge in the wilderness, but suddenly the dragon appears again, and this time, instead of violence, he tries another tactic. This gigantic dragon whose tail was able to sweep down a third part of the stars of heaven (v. 4) now is seen to have “poured water like a river out of his mouth after the woman, to sweep her away with a flood” (ESV). Imagine the scene in your mind. Here is this woman in the wilderness, very small in comparison with the dragon, and he opens his mouth and belches a mighty river which is coming right at her, certain to be her complete undoing unless God intervenes to save her. The question is, “What does this mean?”
I believe the Puritan Matthew Poole’s interpretation of this part of the vision is essentially correct when he wrote (in loc.),
Cast out of his mouth water as a flood; corrupting the judgments of several persons, who, out of the abundance of error in their hearts, preached corrupt doctrine. Such were the followers of Arius, Nestorius, Eutyches, Pelagius, &c. The words of a man’s mouth are as deep waters, Prov. 18:4. The mouth of the wicked poureth out evil things, Prov. 15:28. That he might cause her to be carried away of the flood; on purpose to ruin the church: and, indeed, such were the ill effects of these heresies, that he who is but meanly versed in the history of the fifth age, will see reason to adore the providence of God, that the Roman emperors, upon the sight of them, did not again turn pagans, and add their force to the malice of these pretended Christians against the sincerer part of the church.
Matthew Henry’s commentary concurs with this interpretation, and adds,
The church of God is in more danger from heretics than from persecutors; and heresies are as certainly from the devil as open force and violence.
These are two among Satan’s basic strategies to destroy the church if he could—violent intimidation and doctrinal deception. He will either make it so painful to believe and live as a Christian that you will forsake Christ, or he will lure you away from the true gospel with seductive alternatives, “other doctrines” than those revealed by God from heaven in His Word. Jesus referred to both of these satanic weapons in His classic reprimand of the Pharisees, “Ye are of your father the devil, and the lusts of your father ye will do. He was a murderer from the beginning, and abode not in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he speaketh a lie, he speaketh of his own: for he is a liar, and the father of it” (John 8.44).
My dear brethren, the Church is every bit as threatened by heretical teachers as by murderous persecutors! Both are the devil’s henchmen, and certainly there is a flood of foolishness sweeping away many professing Christians today into cults like Mormonism and the Jehovah’s Witnesses and into apostate Romanism. We live in the “latter times” where some have “departed from the faith, giving heed to seducing spirits” who teach “doctrines of demons speaking lies in hypocrisy” (1 Tim 4.1-2).
Even among the true people of God, we are constantly subject to a barrage of weird stuff, ideas that may have a newness in their packaging and presentation, but for the most part are just recycled human wisdom, not the wisdom from above. And less serious doctrinal error among the godly produces disunity and division that gets in the way of our effective witness to the world, with the multiplicity of denominations still arguing with one another about whether we should sprinkle babies for baptism, for example, or whether there will be a literal 1000-year millennium on earth, or a thousand other controversies among us.
Far too few Christians embrace the faith of our fathers expressed in the Apostles’ Creed, the Nicene Creed, the Athanasian Creed, the Council of Chalcedon, along with the more fully developed statements of doctrine like the Reformed and Baptist confession published in the year 1689!
But the typical evangelical church today is satisfied with a doctrinal statement you could write on one side of a sheet of paper, if not a postcard, and which says so little that many types of heretics and false religionists could subscribe to it without batting an eye!
And whether a professing Christian apostatizes and lands in hell because he would not risk his life to confess Christ or because he was duped into a Kingdom Hall, what difference will it make in the end? I’m not sure that more supposed Christians defect from the Lord because of error than because of persecution!
Now we really must be brief. Notice that
The Lord Saves the Church from Satan’s Lies (v. 16)
The text says, “And the earth helped the woman, and the earth opened her mouth, and swallowed up the flood which the dragon cast out of his mouth.” If our interpretation of verse 15 is correct, then this verse symbolically portrays how that Providence operates in the woman’s best interests. The river never reaches her, because suddenly, the earth opens up to consume the river completely, and she is safe.
Again, God is not explicitly mentioned, but this obviously happens by His command. Remember how certain rebels challenged Moses’ authority as God’s prophet? And do you remember how the Lord was pleased to show their grievous error? He used a spectacular phenomenon as an illustration of terrible divine judgment. The story is in Numbers 16, starting with verse 28:
And Moses said, Hereby ye shall know that the LORD hath sent me to do all these works; for I have not done them of mine own mind. 29 If these men die the common death of all men, or if they be visited after the visitation of all men; then the LORD hath not sent me. 30 But if the LORD make a new thing, and the earth open her mouth, and swallow them up, with all that appertain unto them, and they go down quick into the pit; then ye shall understand that these men have provoked the LORD. 31 And it came to pass, as he had made an end of speaking all these words, that the ground clave asunder that was under them: 32 And the earth opened her mouth, and swallowed them up, and their houses, and all the men that appertained unto Korah, and all their goods (Num 16.28-32).
Now John’s vision of the earth swallowing Satan’s river of lies has its counterpart in every generation of the church of Jesus Christ. For there are always faithful pastors and teachers, starting with the apostles themselves, and then with their true spiritual and doctrinal successors, who are well-instructed in the kingdom of heaven and sound in the faith. These faithful men are both positive teachers of the truth and negative critics of error, because both ministries are necessary for the church’s well-being and preservation in the true gospel.
You can see these pastoral virtues illustrated in Peter and Paul, Augustine and Anselm, Luther and Calvin, Owen and Watson, Whitefield and Edwards, Spurgeon and Ryle, Lloyd-Jones and Al Martin. All of them were faithfully preaching the gospel and just as faithfully exposing Satan’s lies. And besides these more well-known titans of truth, there have been and are ten thousand foot-soldiers in the Lord’s army with congregations of anywhere from a dozen to thousands, preaching the same Bible, confronting the same errors, and representing the same Jesus! This is Providence at work. This is the earth opening her mouth to swallow the river of lies and preserve the life of the woman in the wilderness!
Now we would close with two points from verse 17.
Satan Focuses on the Remnant of True Believers (v. 17a)
It says, “And the dragon was wroth with the woman, and went to make war with the remnant of her seed.” Once again, I find Poole’s explanation satisfactory:
And went to make war with the remnant of her seed; [Satan] gives over [i.e., gives up] his design [i.e., his intention] to ruin the whole church, as not practicable, but resolves to do all the mischief he could to the remnant of her seed, to particular Christians (emphasis mine).
Most of the OT Israelites were the Lord’s people only in name, but not in heart and reality. Many prophets in those days complained bitterly of this very fact. The minority of sincere worshipers of the true and living God were referred to as a remnant within the apostate nation.
It seems that the case is not much different in the visible church today, that is, among those who profess to be Christians. Listen, my beloved, even if we do not count as true Christians the many who are clearly heretical or apostate doctrinally or morally, surely there still remains a great host within what we might loosely call “evangelicalism” or “conservative, biblical Christians,” who are not really born again. Many of these are self-deceived, with a name that they live, while they remain spiritually dead. People like that are on Satan’s big target, but they are not in the center. He aims especially to ruin the true and loyal followers of Jesus Christ, “the remnant of her seed.” They are his special focus of malice and seduction. Beware, my faithful brother and sister!
True Believers Bear the Traits of Spiritual Victors (v. 17b)
But against these true saints, chosen by God from the foundation of the world, Satan cannot ultimately prevail. They are the heirs of God’s saving grace in Christ Jesus our Lord. They are so many temples of the Holy Spirit, and new creatures awaiting the new creation which will be their eternal home.
This remnant within the visible Church is here described as those “which keep the commandments of God, and have the testimony of Jesus Christ.” I hope and pray that includes every one of you hearing me today. If so, then “the anointing that you received from him abides in you, and you have no need that anyone should teach you. But as his anointing teaches you about everything, and is true, and is no lie—just as it has taught you, [you shall] abide in him” (1 John 2.27 ESV). You are obedient and bold witnesses to your Savior and Lord, and even if you are faced with the ultimate test, God’s grace will prove sufficient for your sacrifice of martyrdom.
Do you know why? Because the Lord Jesus says of you, “This one is Mine, and this one, and this one!” As he said to Peter, “I have prayed for you, so that your faith will not fail.” If you keep God’s commandments from the heart and have the testimony of Jesus Christ, you are saved and shall be saved from the furious attacks of the Devil himself! And all this redounds to the praise of our glorious Savior, Jesus! Amen, and amen.
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